Top Technological Quotes

Favorite Technological Quotes

1. "We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative."Author: Adrienne Rich

2. "How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?"Author: Alain De Botton

3. "It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions."Author: Alan Wilson Watts

4. "I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called 'vices', to be free of intruders, and to privacy."Author: Bram Cohen

5. "Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change."Author: C. L. R. James

6. "Will flash cards invade the disk drive makers' core markets and supplant magnetic memory? If they do, what will happen to the disk drive makers? Will they stay atop their markets, catching this new technological wave? Or will they be driven out?"Author: Clayton Christensen

7. "This is a serious development for our medical training establishment is that a host of technological enablers will fuel the disruption of specialists by primary care physicians in the future."Author: Clayton M. Christensen

8. "I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it."Author: David Deutsch

9. "I'm in favor of building the fence, and doing everything technologically to protect our borders. But the other way to secure the border, and one of the things we must do, is put in place good guest-worker programs that employers can actually use."Author: David Rouzer

10. "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the crimes of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value."Author: David Sarnoff

11. "As Lewis Mumford observed, our choices have been grossly limited: "On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by ‘going with' its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine's meaningless existence." All is not lost, though, as he also remarked: "But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out."Author: Derrick Jensen

12. "These were citizens who, never having bothered to awaken to the technological and psychic changes in their world, hadn't bothered to defend themselves, hadn't bothered to build walls or plan counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe."Author: Douglas Coupland

13. "The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism."Author: Edward Abbey

14. "The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren'tquantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment,they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulationscould do in the face of built-in universal human machinery. Having said this,though, I now feel no particular impulse to vote Republican.Also, it's quite possible that someday you could create perfectly unselfishpeople… if you used sufficiently advanced neurosurgery, drugs, and/orbrain-computer interfaces to engineer their brains into a new state that nocurrent human brain occupies. Whether or not this is in fact possible isn'tsomething that ideology gets to decide. The reasoning errors of pastcommunists can't prohibit any particular future technological advance frombeing possible or practical. Having said that, I feel no particular impulse toturn "liberal."Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

15. "I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving."Author: Garth Stein

16. "The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject."Author: Geoffrey Harvey

17. "Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake."Author: George Friedman

18. "Eighteen fifty-eight was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. And they were the first to 'Twitter' transatlantically."Author: Hans Rosling

19. "I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a 'time out' from technological progress as we know it."Author: James Howard Kunstler

20. "Technological things, that Germans and Japanese would get real excited about."Author: John Badham

21. "In this sense, Byzantine culture embodies the French historian Fernand Braudel's notion of the longue durée, the long term: that which survives the vicissitudes of changing governments, newfangled fashions or technological improvements, an ongoing inheritance that can both imprison and inspire."Author: Judith Herrin

22. "Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority."Author: Kim Il Sung

23. "I'm technologically challenged, so I finally hooked up Bluetooth in my truck so I can talk going down the road."Author: Kurt Busch

24. "Fiscal decentralisation does not lead to higher economic growth because economic growth is much more driven by factors other than taxes and spending, e.g. increases in technological progress and improved human capital."Author: Lars Feld

25. "All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations."Author: Lawrence Lessig

26. "Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing."Author: Marvin Bower

27. "Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about."Author: Mauricio Lasansky

28. "If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery."Author: Michael Harrington

29. "Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets."Author: Michael Pollan

31. "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."Author: Nam June Paik

32. "Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular."Author: Naomi Klein

33. "While many technological measures can be taken to secure safety at nuclear power plants, such measures on their own cannot cover great risks."Author: Naoto Kan

34. "Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement."Author: Neil Postman

35. "[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation [sic] which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell."Author: Nicholas Murray

36. "Mercer opens hi mouth to argue, and Bastion Banister chooses this moment to open his mouth and snap at the circling bee. To his own evident surprise, he captures it, and there's a curious little glonking noise as he swallows it whole. Mercer cringes slightly, as if expecting the dog to explode.Nothing happens."All right," Polly Cradle says, and then, pro forma, "Bastion, you're a very naughty boy.""Yes," Mercer says acidly. "The dog has consumed a possibly lethal technological device of immense sophistication, deprived us of our only piece of tangible evidence and possibly doomed us all to some sort of arcane scientific retaliative strike. By all means, chide him severely with your voice. That will solve everyone's problems."Author: Nick Harkaway

37. "Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding."Author: Nina Fedoroff

38. "Out of the tens of thousands of prosthetic legs they've made, there's never been any 400-meter athletes run under 50 seconds. So, if this was such a technologically advanced prosthetic leg, then how come not everyone's qualifying, or coming close to the qualification time, then?"Author: Oscar Pistorius

39. "As in any technological revolution, there will be winners and losers. On balance, everyone will come out ahead, although there will be particular companies that will not be able to cope with a new environment."Author: Ralph Merkle

40. "Sadly, in our technological, impersonal, and avaricious consumer society, people merely hold on to jobs. They put in their time, leave at the five o'clock bell, pick up their pay checks, and leave the whole business behind them. Work, for so many, becomes a necessary evil. They go at it grudgingly, at best resignedly. It is hard to fault them; the stressful conditions and uncertainty under which so many workers labor force them into an adversarial relationship with their occupations and employers."Author: Robert Dykstra

41. "The model? Whoa.' But Spanner's interest in human beings, even when dead or famous, was still secondary to his fondness for rare comics, technological innovation, and bands of which Strike had never heard."Author: Robert Galbraith

42. "The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is – not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footsteps on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one's own life, in a less dramatic way."Author: Robert M. Pirsig

43. "We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself.We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy.The land holds stories."Author: Terry Tempest Williams

44. "But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will."Author: Vernor Vinge

45. "Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us."Author: Veronica Roth

46. "We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation."Author: Wade Davis

47. "As far as the U.S. economy is concerned, I always believe that the U.S. economy is solidly based, not only in a material sense, but more importantly, the United States has the strength of scientific and technological talent, and managerial expertise."Author: Wen Jiabao

48. "A nuclear reactor is a proposed "solution" to "the energy problem." But like all big-technological "solutions," this one "solves" a single problem by causing many...A garden, on the other hand, is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is a part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense."Author: Wendell Berry

49. "Productivity and the growth of productivity must be the first economic consideration at all times, not the last. That is the source of technological innovation, jobs, and wealth."Author: William E. Simon

50. "It takes a heavy commitment to quality education for all to avoid that stratification of society, those needless degrees of separation. But even the present-day United States has lost what commitment it used to have to free education of high quality. Anyone reading the annual surveys of science literacy (another example: fewer than half of Americans know that the earth orbits the sun once a year) has to wonder how badly most people are going to be left behind, further along into the 21st century, whether they too will become "stubborn, apathetic, and perverse" toward a scientific and technological world they must view as magical, beyond their comprehension, accessible only via the right incantations."Author: William H. Calvin